Error Theory

Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Missing from Obama's big energy tour: not a single word about GHGs or CO2 or climate

Obama's first big energy-policy speech was to the United Nations in 2009 when he boldly told the entire world that it had to get off of fossil fuels because: "the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing." "Rising sea levels threaten every coastline," blah, blah, blah, but to the true believers, it was lines from a psalm:

More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict. All the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution [must] act together.Wind turbines and solar panels and batteries for hybrid cars.Loan guarantees and tax credits.A future that is worthy of our children

Now, not a single word about climate or CO2. Guess that makes it official. Greenhouse gases and global warming are no longer a motivating concern for U.S. energy policy. Quick, tell the EPA, whose war on CO2 is already shutting down its first tenth of the grid. Not needed anymore guys. CO2 is no longer even worth mentioning. Can we hold Obama to it?

He did repeat "clean energy" a bunch of times in his Nevada speech, but there is NOTHING unclean about CO2, so that doesn't count. CO2 is the essential nutrient from which all life on the surface of the earth is constructed. Animals get their carbon building blocks from plants which get it from atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis, and current levels of CO2—about 0.039 percent of the atmosphere—are alarmingly close to the minimum required to sustain life.

Carbon dioxide is necessary to sustain life in concentrations of about 0.04 percent of the earth's atmosphere ...

The biosphere craves more of this healthful gas, not less.

The ONLY concern about CO2 is the idea that its greenhouse warming effect might be dangerous, and no such concern is being voiced by Obama. Apparently it is off the table, which ought to clear off all of his green energy plans as well, because their explicit rationale has been the greenhouse threat from CO2.

"Climate" was why, in Obama's 2008 words, electricity prices would have to "necessarily skyrocket." It was all about capping CO2 in order to save the planet from global warming:

[C]limate change is a great example. You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

The danger of CO2 required a switch to green fairy power. Coal would be forced into bankruptcy while alternate-reality approaches to energy would be subsidized:

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

So much for "all of the above." All but coal, shale oil, tar-sands, ANWR oil, and pretty much anything that produces CO2. And yet, now that CO2 is no longer an official concern, none of these anti-CO2 policies has altered one whit.

Shutting down Keystone and ANWR are just the latest in the long train of Obama-democrat shutdowns of fossil energy, and Obama is still calling for more Solyndras. From his kick-off speech last week in Maryland:

And I want to keep on making those investments. (Applause.) I don’t want to see wind turbines and solar panels and high-tech batteries made in other countries by other workers. I want to make them here. (Applause.) I want to make them here in Maryland. I want to make them here in the United States of America, with American workers. That's what I want. (Applause.)

The only thing new is a switch in rationale. Out with saving the planet and in with ... saving the economy. Now the reason we are going to unplug our existing energy infrastructure and put all of our eggs in baskets that can't float without government subsidy is because that's the way to prosperity.

Not an easy sell, but Obama is up to it. His Maryland speech was the template, resting his economic argument on two of the biggest whoppers ever told: 1) that his administration is already drilling aggressively yet gas prices are still high, proving that aggressive drilling can't bring gas prices down, and 2) America is an oil-poor country, so really, our only alternative is rainbow colored unicorn farts.

Thorough take-down of the Obama-whoppers here. But the big take-away? CO2 is no longer enough of a concern to be worth mentioning, according to President Obama himself.

Obama doesn't mean it, but if he's going to abandon his climate-based opposition to fossil fuels then we should hold him to that: economic considerations alone call for Drill Baby Drill; there is no more need to fund the anti-CO2 frauds at the IPCC; and come on EPA, you heard the boss. Coal, "clean" in the old-fashioned sense of not spewing soot, is a-okay.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

President no longer worried about CO2: focus on alternative energy is economic says Obama, no mention of climate

"President no longer worried about CO2!" That's what the headlines should have read last week after Obama presented an elaborate argument that alternative energy is the only viable response to high energy prices without ever once mentioning CO2, global warming or climate change. Instead, he presented the need to lessen our reliance on oil purely as an economic imperative.

Back when he thought that global warming was a winning concern Obama used to acknowledge that his anti-CO2 policies were going to cause high energy prices (forcing them to "necessarily skyrocket"). Now he is trying to use the high energy prices that he intentionally caused as a reason to get away from fossil energy. But if we are no longer worried about climate, how about just undoing the anti-fossil-fuel policies that drove prices up in the first place?

Obama's silence on climate is a testament to how thoroughly the alarmists have lost the climate debate in the eyes of the voting public. Obama can't even mention climate change (never mind global warming), even in a speech about his own climate-driven policies.

To make his economic argument, Obama puts forward two glaring lies. Let's take these whoppers one at a time.

The lie that we are already aggressively developing our fossil resources

From the President's March 15th energy policy speech at Prince George's Community College in Largo, Maryland:

Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. (Applause.) Any time. That's a fact. That's a fact. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high. I want everybody to listen to that -- we have more oil rigs operating now than ever. That's a fact. We’ve approved dozens of new pipelines to move oil across the country. We announced our support for a new one in Oklahoma that will help get more oil down to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Over the last three years, my administration has opened millions of acres of land in 23 different states for oil and gas exploration. (Applause.) Offshore, I’ve directed my administration to open up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources. That includes an area in the Gulf of Mexico we opened up a few months ago that could produce more than 400 million barrels of oil.

So do not tell me that we’re not drilling. (Applause.) We’re drilling all over this country.

That's chutzpah, bragging about opening up drilling in the Gulf after using the Deep Horizon spill as an excuse for wiping out the Gulf drilling industry with an illegal moratorium.

Everyone knows about the big anti-oil moves from Obama and the Democrats, like rejecting the Keystone pipeline and continuing to block drilling in ANWR, but if you want a picture of how systematic and extreme their anti-fossil-energy policies have been, take a look at the list compiled by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings. As soon as they got in the Obamatons started revoking all the permits that were in the pipeline: for exploration, for mining, for drilling, for building power plants. Everything was shut down to almost nothing, and that is the way it has stayed.

Speaker John Bohner put a few of the highlights onto a timeline along with gas prices. Cause and effect:

Energy experts say the president’s rhetoric isn’t exactly forthright. It’s unfair for the president to take credit for record high oil production. Not only does it take oil three to five years to come online, which means the previous administration was responsible for approving the exploration and drilling permits that led to increased production, but oil production on federal lands actually declined from 2010 to 2011. Oil production on private lands is responsible for the increase.

She quotes CNS for the specifics:

As CNSNews.com has reported, oil production on federal lands declined in fiscal year 2011 from fiscal year 2010 by 11 percent, and natural gas production on federal lands dropped by 6 percent during the same timeframe.

In contrast, oil production on private and state lands accounted for the entire increase, reported the IER, as production was up 14 percent from 2010 to 2011. Natural gas also was up 12 percent from 2010 to 2011.

The energy boom from advances in fracking technology are so massive that Obama has not been able to suppress them entirely, but he sure is trying, and we know why. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu was up-front about this as recently as two weeks ago when he testified before the House Appropriations committee:

There’s a problem with a strategy that only relies on drilling and that is, America uses more than 20 percent of the world’s oil. If we drilled every square inch of this country -- so we went to your house and we went to the National Mall and we put up those rigs everywhere -- we’d still have only 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. Let’s say we miss something -- maybe it’s 3 percent instead of 2. We’re using 20; we have 2.

Now, you don’t need to be getting an excellent education at Prince George’s Community College to know that we’ve got a math problem here. (Laughter and applause.) I help out Sasha occasionally with her math homework and I know that if you’ve got 2 and you’ve got 20, there’s a gap. (Laughter.) There’s a gap, right? ...

We will not fully be in control of our energy future if our strategy is only to drill for the 2 percent but we still have to buy the 20 percent.

Obama's 2% figure refers to "proven reserves," and the smallness of this particular number is actually a measure, not of our resources, but of how little they have been developed. Investors Business Dailyexplains:

The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world's proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves "are a small subset of recoverable resources," because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.

We have very little "proved reserves" because we have developed only a small fraction of our resources into active fields. The relevant number to look at is the amount of oil we could produce if it were allowed, and here we are proverbial thousand pound gorilla. Again, from IDB:

We actually have the world's largest fossil energy resources, and the "recoverable" part is rapidly expanding as the technology for extracting it advances. Estimates for technically recoverable shale gas reserves increased 134% in 2010, and we've hardly begun on shale oil. Then there are methane hydrates, which according to the Department of Energy contain "more energy potential ... than all other fossil energy resources combined."

In short, the United States, and the entire world, have only been tapping the planet's most easily accessible fossil energy supplies, and even those are far from running out, while vastly larger resources wait in store. Obama's claims about the impossibility of relying on fossil energy are a fairy tale for childish green adults who want to see themselves as saving the planet. They dream of going "forward" to windmills and absorbing solar radiation like a snake on a rock, yet none of them have enough confidence in the saving-the-planet part to even mention it anymore.

The war on CO2 is over! Tell the EPA!

Obama's lies about fossil resources are just supporting lies. His big lie is his pretense that his anti-CO2 policies are not about CO2. So take him at face value. He has apparently surrendered his claim that CO2 is dangerous. From his energy-policy speech, it seems that global warming is no longer a motivating concern.

THAT is a big story. Quick, tell the EPA. With this change in the administration's position there should be no more regulation of CO2 and Obama should rescind his promise to bankrupt the coal industry:

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.

That war against coal is proceedingapace, every bit as much as Obama's drive for higher gas prices. And all for nothing, since even Obama is no longer worried about CO2.

At some point—long before we run out of fossil energy—a cheaper source of energy will be developed and fossil fuels will go by the wayside. The only reason to interdict that natural progression and try to go backwards to wind and solar is a belief that fossil fuels imperil the planet. For that to be true, human effects on climate would have to dominate natural effects, a hypothesis that has already been falsified by 15 years of no warming. The only people who believe it at this point are the paid shills of our lavishly funded climate-alarm industry and their anti-capitalist allies. It has actually become unmentionable, which really does warrant some mention.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Andrew Bolt has been blogging for the past week about the totalitarian tendencies in the just released "Media Inquiry" commissioned by Australia's Labor government. This "Finkelstein Report" advocates unlimited regulation of virtually all published and broadcast speech in Australia.

The actual proposal can be scanned in a few minutes (pages 290-300 here). It would set up a 21 member News Media Council, charged to enforce at least some level of oversight:

While the setting of standards should be left to the News Media Council, they should incorporate certain minimum standards, such as fairness and accuracy [§ 11.52, p. 291].

But there is no corresponding limit on how much the Council is allowed to regulate. Just the opposite, the Report explicitly declares that protecting freedom of speech is not part of the Council's mission! §11.55, p. 292:

The News Media Council requires clearly defined functions. It is not recommended that one of them be the promotion of free speech. There are ample bodies and persons in the community who do that more than adequately.

Really? In a country that has no constitutional or statutory protection for speech, how are non-governmental "bodies and persons in the community" more than adequate to protect speech from a governmental body that is endowed with unlimited power to regulate speech?

The report explicitly calls for opinion to be regulated along with news (§11.64, p. 294) , and while low-readership blogs would possibly be exempted, Bolt notes that the suggested threshold for regulation would cover any blog that averaged even one reader a day, and even that would be at the complete discretion of the Council (§11.59, p. 293).

In addition to making whatever rules they want, the Media Council will also sit in judgment (§11.70, p. 296):

If not resolved informally, complaints should be dealt with by a complaints panel consisting of one, three or, only in exceptional cases, five members of the News Media Council.

Elsewhere the Media Inquiry makes perfectly clear which views are to be corrected: global warming skepticism and criticism of the Labor government.

Skeptics could even be forced to take their own views down and post contrary views in their place. Just impose all the contemplated remedies at once, and why not? There are no stated limits. There are no limits on scope: that political speech is to be granted wide play, or even whether challengers for office must submit to oversight on their claims about the incumbent regime. Neither are any procedural limits imposed. The Council can make up whatever rules it wants. And if people refuse?

Failures to comply (§11.77, p. 298) are to be turned over to existing courts (civil or criminal not specified) which would be called upon to punish non-compliance as contempt of court (i.e. running fines or jail until compliance is forthcoming). In other words, unlimited punishment.

In the name of efficiency there are to be no "internal" or "external" appeals (§278, p. 299), but judges deciding on contempt charges would be allowed to review Council rulings if they feel that their dockets are not full enough already (§11.79, p. 299).

Orwellian "benefits"

§11.86 (p. 300) lists the proclaimed benefits that justify this system of unlimited regulation. Compared to the barbaric system of liberty, where people compete to offer the most convincing arguments, having the government be the arbiter of truth will:

[enable] the public to have confidence that journalistic standards will be upheld and that complaints will be resolved without fear or favour.

Yes, government is well known to never play favorites, and Solomonic power is famous for its even handed wisdom: "Cut the baby in half!" Liberty is way overrated.

Solomon did not actually cut the baby but we can be certain that this 21 member Council, all appointed by a single "independent committee" (like the authors of the Finkelstein report!), would be an abattoir.

"Independent" the report clarifies (§11.46, p. 291), means "Independent from government" (emphasis added), and yet it is to have the power of government. In other words, it is to have unaccountable power, and this independence from accountability is to be conferred upon a well known permanent Labor constituency, Universities Australia, which would get to appoint a majority of the "independent committee."

Thus the entire enterprise would have the great virtue (from the Labor point of view) that unlike the sitting government, the voters cannot "throw the bums out." Here the appointing committee and the appointed Council will violate the fundamental principle of republicanism as articulated by Alexander Hamilton, who appealed at the New York Convention that:

The true principle of a republic is, that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.

The final punctuation mark on Finkelstein's plan, the last proclaimed benefit of allowing dissidents to be swallowed whole by the Ministry of Truth, is timeless virtue:

Enhancing the public flow of information and the exchange of views.

"Was is peace," and "we've always been at war with Eastasia." As Brendan O'Neill writes in The Australian:

...we’re witnessing the unravelling of many of the values and virtues of the modern era.

All in a knee-jerk snit over the fact that the left-dominated media does not yet have a complete publishing monopoly. Dissenting voices can still be heard, and Finkelstein finds that very disturbing.

Negative liberty: non-existent in Australia and in peril in America

To an American, what is most striking about the Australian plan is the complete absence of any statement of negative rights, or freedom from restrictions on speech. Our entire concept of free speech is framed in negative terms: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." The Australians have no constitutional protection for speech, but it is still astounding to see how readily the left would overthrow this pillar of Western liberty in exchange for partisan advantage.

The same totalitarian ambitions are at work in America too. They face greater legal obstacles here, but key actors are powerfully placed. Obama's "regulatory czar" Cass Sunstein wants to use the system of "notice and takedown" from copyright law to shut down "conspiracy theories." As an example, he wants to suppress claims that:

the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

If SOPA had passed then all of the necessary machinery would have been in place, ready to expand from copyright infringement to the suppression of conspiracy theories at the drop of a one-line rider on any bill. At that point our freedom to speak our minds would lie in the hands of Sunstein booster Elena Kagan (who brought Sunstein to Harvard, calling him "the preeminent legal scholar of our time"); the racist Sonya Sotomayor (a long-time member of La Raza, or "the race"); and a borderline Court-majority of similar un-worthies.

We dodged a bullet and it looks like Australia will too, given how well the Finkelstein report is being received down under, but dodging bullets is a precarious business. If we don't somehow manage to effect a fundamental retrenchment of liberty it won't be long before we lose it.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

The most essential Aussie blog is Andrew Bolt. It's appalling what the left is up to down under and Bolt is on top of it all, like the "media inquiry" that was just released by the Australian government, calling for legal oversight of all published speech, even down to blogs that get one reader a day.

The proposed scheme of regulation (pages 290-300) includes NO limits on the restriction of speech. Page 291 calls for open ended power to regulate speech, and the only stated constraint is that the ten-man ten-woman News Media Council MUST regulate:

While the setting of standards should be left to the News Media Council, they should incorporate certain minimum standards, such as fairness and accuracy.

As for how much the News Media Panel can regulate, no constraints are listed anywhere in the plan. Don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself. Opinion is explicitly subject to regulation, and absolutely no stated freedoms from regulation are mentioned anywhere, unless maybe you're a blogger who gets less than one reader a day, but that too is flexible.

In addition to making whatever rules they want, the panel will also sit in judgment (p. 296):

If not resolved informally, complaints should be dealt with by a complaints panel consisting of one, three or, only in exceptional cases, five members of the News Media Council.

Elsewhere the government makes perfectly clear which views are to be corrected: global warming skepticism and criticism of the Labor government.

Take that skeptics! We'll force you to take down YOUR views and put our OURS in their place! Eeee-Haw.

Truly Orwellian is the last benefit that the government claims for this system of unlimited regulation (p. 300):

Enhancing the public flow of information and the exchange of views.

Using speech to attack speech IS legitimate

Bolt has already been prosecuted for running afoul of Australia's already crazy speech laws. He had the temerity to point out that many of the benefits set aside for Australian aborigines are going to people with no visible aboriginal ancestry (i.e. the set-asides are going to people who look like Andrew Bolt). ILLEGAL! So it's understandable that he's sensitive about any attack on speech.

Still, when I was vicariously visiting the anti-pode of the Anglosphere a few days ago, I was surprised by Andrew's take on a media controversy. As Bolt relates it , a television chat-show grossly insulted a hero-soldier who had won Australia's Victoria Cross, suggesting he must be stupid and probably couldn't perform sexually. Yet Bolt was disgusted that viewers were complaining to the network and were urging sponsors to stop supporting the show.

Andrew has been attacked for his views in this same way, with critics trying to get him shut down, but I think he's gotten off track here. There is no comparison between official suppression of speech and people using their own speech to attack what they disagree with.

It's easy for Andrew to say that people should limit themselves to changing the channel. He has his own platform. He has more powerful ways to express himself. Most people don't, and expressing their opinion that a particular person is not worthy of being sponsored to an elevated position of public influence is perfectly legitimate, not implying laziness or a "fat bottom" or any other of Bolt's pejoratives.

If the exercise of this form of expression puts sponsors to the acid test as to what public voices they are willing to stand behind, so be it. If that's where the evolution of liberty takes us, then that's where we go. Andrew's moralizing against these "moralizers" does not impress, but I guess even the colossus of Australia has to have a toe of clay.

Not unilateral disarmament, but tit-for-tat

We face the same boycott issue in this country, with the left's phony outrage at Rush Limbaugh for daring to suggest that a woman who goes before the United States Senate demanding that other people buy her a thousand dollars worth of contraceptives a year could be likened to a "slut." Seems pretty mild to me, but the left is good at scaring advertisers and a few of Limbaugh's actually jumped ship.

They have since figured out that the people who demanded they jump ship weren't really customers and that their actual customers are the people who have listened to their ads on Rush Limbaugh's show since the 1980's (duh), so now they want to jump back on-ship, but Rush is having none of it. They betrayed his listeners and to be loyal to these fans there will be no backtracking, which sends the message to other advertisers that they had better figure out where their bread is buttered before knuckling under to left-wing manipulation. Hey, this liberty thing might sort itself out after all!

But just because these attacks might prove survivable by conservatives doesn't mean that conservatives should themselves refuse to boycott. In the name of his young daughters, President Obama himself joined the dog-pile against Rush while studiously ignoring far more misogynistic attacks on women by his own supporters. Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin are regularly called the worst names by the highest profile pro-Obama hacks. If the left is going to set the standard that Rush must be ostracized for calling a 99.999th-percentile contraception-user a slut, then surely top Obama donor and television host Bill Maher should be ostracized for calling the Governor of Alaska a c+, right?

Otherwise conservatives are unilaterally disarming, which is just brain dead. If you don't want to use chemical warfare you at least demand that the other side foreswear chemical weapons as well. You don't promise not to use them no matter whether other side uses them or not. You use "tit for tat." If they use chemicals, you use chemicals, until they lose enough battles that they stop using this weapon.

I've joined in twice in recent days. Being a Carbonite customer, I'm dropping them for dropping Rush as soon as I get up to speed with another online backup provider. Plus I nixed HBO, telling them (in response not just to Bill Maher, but also to their new anti-Palin mockumentary):

Goodby HBO. So you have decided you want to be a left-wing boutique? So be it.

Being a victim of chemical warfare himself, Bolt is well aware that the other side IS using it. They need to be punched back, "twice as hard" as our thug-in-chief likes to say, and the most important reason to fight back is precisely because it is the thug-in-chief and his Media Matters co-conspirators who are involved. That turns the left's private boycotting into a semi-official policy, which is bad behavior, and if this attack on conservative speech is actually being orchestrated from the White House, it could even be unconstitutional.

For countering left-wing speech, I would never want to see conservatives make the phony charges of offense that the left does, but come on, the people in the Aussie case are genuinely offended! Bolt's latest indicates that the conservative boycotters are proving to be just as ineffective as the Limbaugh boycotters. Good news, perhaps, but it doesn't stop him from continuing to rip on conservatives who are angered by total disrespect of a war hero. I would rather see Andrew simply use his powerful voice to speak out in favor of the offending television host NOT losing her job, without trying to de-legitimize those who think otherwise.

Bimbos down under: pretty little chat-host channels Andrew Dice Clay

To see how forgivable the offending chat-show segment actually was, I took a look at the video of Yumi Stynes and her "Circle" commenting on Corporal Roberts-Smith. She was trying to be sexy and ended up sounding like Dice (i.e. a female version of "put a beer holder and an ash tray on her back and she'd be perfect"). It was meant to be a sexist joke obviously, but also a sexist compliment, and it came out more clueless than nasty, so no big deal. Her male co-panelist, on the other hand, should never appear on television again. The comment I left at Andrew's place is below:

Okay, I went and looked at the video. She sees how well built this soldier is and the first thought that pops into yummy little Yumi's vacuous head is "BIMBO!" Set aside that a man who surmised that a woman must be stupid just because she has a good figure probably WOULD be fired. What the comment shows about Yumi is that she must not have ever reflected with any appreciation on the soldiers who defend her liberty or on what they actually do.

Pretty much ALL frontline troops work themselves into the best shape they can as a matter survival and battle effectiveness, but she looks at this guy and is absolutely clueless about why he looks the way he does. That's what is so telling about her bimbo joke. If she had an iota of patriotism she would see his strength-of-mind carved right into his physique. When she sees the opposite, the irony is how her comment applies so perfectly to herself. SHE'S the bimbo.

Here's this titty, pretty, giggly, airhead who is obviously there precisely for the flirty appeal of those qualities. She was palpably breathless as she called Roberts-Smith a bimbo, so she obviously DID mean it as a compliment. She probably thought he would take it that way too. After all, he's just a bimbo, right, just like her? What more could he want than to be complimented on his body? And he probably didn't mind the compliment, but the catty jealousy displayed by the elderly man, suggesting that the male bimbo probably can't get it up, truly is disgusting. That nasty old fool should be out of public life.

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.